On Fri July 15 2005 10.48, Ihsan Dogan wrote:
On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 10:30, Umberto Annino wrote:
I've just read in 20Minuten, that Swisscom apparently is blocking Skype traffic over their UMTS network. They only want UMTS to be used for "data" traffic, not for voice (yeah, so what exactly IS a UDP-packet then ????).
Other UMTS providers are doing the same. There was an article on heise.de this (or perhaps last week) about that. I think it's time that GSM and UMTS providers are thinking about their prices. Especially here in Switzerland.
Telcos hate (any form of) VoIP in userland. Telcos come from a place where they can monitor/bill exact usage. To them it sums up to lost revenues: [1][2]
While such a barrier could easely be circumvented, e.g. a vpn to some place. The common user is being repressed for the above reasons.
Probably for most users it would be cheaper to pay the swisscom fee for traffic (80.- a month for 1 gig of traffic) and then reroute the normal landline via sipgateway, then to pay swisscom's hefty mobile fee.
Another issue is that Skype causes traffic whilst not in use. Apperantly to some statistics posted in some forum I cannot remember: up to a gigabyte a month. So they could argue consumer protection.
[1] "http://www.computerweeklyms.com/research/ovum/The impact of VoIP.pdf" [2] http://www.nzz.ch/2005/05/24/hy/articleCTEMZ.html (German)